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Topic: Sinister Forces (Read 53481 times)

Merrick’s film, Manson, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973. Merrick had been an acting coach for Sharon Tate, and had easy access to the Family members who were still at large. He was shot to death at his studio in Hollywood in 1977.

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Family members were still involved in murder and attempted murder. Brenda McCann, aka Nancy Pitman, was arrested on November 11, 1972 in Stockton, California. Brenda had been Bruce Davis’ girlfriend, with whom she had been on the lam in the Los Angeles sewers for months before they turned themselves in during December 1970. This time, she was found in a house which contained a body buried in the basement, that of Lauren Willett (19), who had been shot in the head. Along with McCann were two members of the Aryan Brotherhood, as well as another woman named Priscilla Cooper (21). Both women had X’s carved into their foreheads, identifying them as Manson Family members. What alerted police to the house was the fact that a car parked outside belonged to a man who had been murdered a few days earlier in Northern California. James T. Willett was a former Marine, and had been found in his Marine uniform: killed with a shotgun and decapitated.

They joined the church in 1970 and stayed with it through thick and thin for the next six years. When they left in 1976, they were afraid for their lives. They campaigned vociferously against it, and did what they could to inform government and civic leaders of the threat it posed to society. They spoke of beatings, sexual abuse including the rape of men, women and children, public humiliation, torture, brainwashing, and the mind control of children, including sleep deprivation and being made to witness terrible punishments meted out for the slightest of offences and, sometimes, for no discernible offence at all. The leader considered himself a God, said he was the reincarnation of Jesus and Lenin, and demanded absolute obedience from his followers, who numbered in the thousands. It was Charles Manson and his Family writ large and fine-tuned. In November of 1979 the Mertles published a book about their experiences. In February 1980, they were murdered in their home along with their teenaged daughter, each shot in the head execution-style by person or persons unknown. Their triple homicide has remained unsolved to this day. The Mertles had published their book under a pseudonym: Jeannie Mills. It was entitled Six Years With God and was subtitled Life Inside Rev. Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple.

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Even the biography of the man at the center of the holocaust, Jim Jones, was sketchy and open to interpretation. His presumed close association with Dan Mitrione was never investigated by the US government or, if it was, the results were never made public. Mitrione was the man taken hostage and then killed by the leftist guerrilla Tupamaros in Uruguay in 1970, revolutionaries who knew that he was a CIA agent with AID agency cover. Jones and Mitrione had known each other in Indiana, where Mitrione was a cop specializing in juveniles and Jones a fifteen-year-old sidewalk preacher, and they were both in Brazil at the same time in the early 1960s: Mitrione with a police training unit that was under Agency for International Development (AID) cover, and Jones in some murky capacity that involved the US

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Mitrione, it is now known, was involved with the training of Latin American police forces in the use of torture and drugs in interrogations, under the auspices of the now-defunct and cynically-entitled Office of Public Safety (OPS), an Orwellian organization that was formed during the Eisenhower administration. Mitrione was an avid practitioner of the methods he taught and, according to one of his trainees in Uruguay in the late 1960s, he would pick up homeless people on the streets to be used as guinea pigs in his training sessions, bloody interrogations which were always conducted in a soundproof room. In Montevideo, this room was in the basement of his home. When the derelicts died during the course of the “training,” their bodies would be dumped back in the streets as a warning to Communist insurgents.

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The drugs and techniques, of course, were the direct and unequivocal legacy of ongoing MK-ULTRA research. According to John Marks, In 1966 CIA staffers, including [John] Gittinger himself, took part in selecting members of an equally controversial police unit in Uruguay—the anti-terrorist section that fought the Tupamaro urban guerrillas.… Agency operators worked to set up this special force together with the Agency for International Development’s Public Safety Mission (whose members included Dan Mitrione, later kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros). The CIA-assisted police claimed they were in a life-and-death struggle against the guerrillas, and they used incredibly brutal methods, including torture, to stamp out most of the Uruguayan left along with the guerrillas. John Gittinger was the “MKULTRA program’s resident genius.” He developed something called the Personality Assessment System (PAS). An incredibly complex system, it resisted computerization due to all the variables, and at one point Gittinger had something like 29,000 separate test results on computer printout in his office that he mined for data on the personalities of drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, criminals, the easily hypnotizable, etc. His specialty was uncovering the “underlying personality structure—discrepancies that produce tension, conflict, and anxiety.”

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During the same period, Andrija Puharich (of Arthur Young, MK-ULTRA and “Council of the Nine” fame) was also in Brazil investigating the famous “psychic surgeon,” Arigo, while Arthur Hochberg (of Robert Mullen and E. Howard Hunt fame) was also in Brazil working for the CIA station there.

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At that time, the early 1950s, Jones’ politics was by all accounts as virulently anti-Communist as those of his fellow clergymen, and his radio programs and preaching carried a clear anti-Communist message. This was, after all, the McCarthy Era and anti-Communism was fashionable in some circles (just as socialism was in others), and for a Christian minister in the Midwest who traveled the circuit between Cincinatti, Dayton, Richmond, Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, it was to be expected that he would preach against the godless Russians and the atheist Chinese.

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after his mysterious sojourn in Brazil, Jones gradually abandoned any pretense at standard Biblical terminology or theology. Jones began to speak of revolution, and of Jesus as a socialist. He began to gradually mock and villify the God of the Jews, the “Sky God” as he called him, and to identify Jehovah with satanic forces bent on the destruction of humanity. It was pure neo-Nazism, except it was so convoluted that most of his followers would never have recognized it for what it was. As detailed at some length in my previous work, Unholy Alliance, the Nazi ideologists of the Third Reich had reinterpreted the Bible in such a way that the God of the Israelites was Satan. This has become standard theology in such racist organizations in America as the Christian Identity movement.

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Lucifer was the “light-bringer,” and intent on delivering humanity from the clutches of the evil Jehovah. This is also a Gnostic belief, as demonstrated in the scriptures uncovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. In this system, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the true God, who wanted to deliver the human race from the blind Creator God, the Demiurge who wanted Adam and Eve as his personal slaves. This deity is equivalent to the H.P. Lovecraft creature, the “blind idiot god of chaos,” for it was he who created material forms with reckless abandon and who—in his blindness—believed he was the Superior Being and demanded that Adam and Eve worship only him. According to Gnostic legend, this being—Samael—was then chastised by the other gods for his vanity in assuming the mantle of Supreme God.

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This multiplicity of gods with Biblical geneaology is what gave rise to the theology of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, as discussed in Book One. This form of Gnosticism also influenced Charles Manson, and he began to identify himself with Abraxas, a famous Gnostic deity whose numerological equivalent is 365, the same as the number of days in the year and thus representative of time itself.

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There is evidence to show that Jim Jones and his wife, Marceline, visited Cuba in 1960, for reasons unknown.

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Hougan demonstrates that Jones was known to the CIA and the FBI before the massacre, and that the CIA maintained a file on Jones that coincided quite precisely with Dan Mitrione’s career as an overseas “trainer” of foreign police forces. That is, the file on Jones was opened when Mitrione began to work for the AID-sponsored OPS program and was closed when Mitrione was killed in Uruguay in 1970

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According to a Cuban whom he met in Havana during that trip, Jones was involved in trying to arrange for Cubans to emigrate to the United States. This was part of a larger American policy of encouraging Cubans to defect from Castro, in order to weaken the Cuban economy as well as win some propaganda points. Jones was specifically trying to recruit black Cubans to come to Indianapolis where his Peoples Temple was still located. It seems that nothing much came of this plan, but Jones was evidently working on behalf of American political interests when he was there. He brought back with him photographs of himself in Cuba and most curiously a photo taken of him standing next to a downed aircraft that had been flown by anti-Castro Cubans—not exactly on the main tourist circuit, even in revolutionary Cuba.

As pointed out in Hougan’s research, Jones had two passports issued to him at two different times. One, issued in Chicago on June 28, 1960 and another issued in Indianapolis on January 30, 1962. The problem is twofold. First, as there is strong evidence (on the basis of an eyewitness account, an affidavit signed by Jones during that period in Cuba, etc.) that Jones was in Cuba in the first few months of 1960, how did he travel there if his passport was not issued until June 28? Secondly, why the two passports, as the first one issued in 1960 certainly would still be valid? It is certain that Jones was in Cuba in February of 1960. It is also certain that he visited Cuba again a year later. And there is further evidence—also incontrovertible, and verified by newspaper accounts printed at the time—that Jones had visited Guyana (when it was still called “British Guiana”) years before he ever set up the commune known to the world as Jonestown. In fact, according to an eyewitness—a Cuban he eventually brought to the United States in August 1960 to stay with the Temple in Indianapolis—Jones appeared to have been well-traveled by that time and “knew Latin America well. He had already been to Guyana, and wanted to start a collective there.”

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He was named as the Director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission when he was thirty years old, by most accounts, which would mean sometime in 1961. One wonders what the duties of a Human Rights Commission director would have been in Indianapolis in 1961, but whatever they were, by October he was resigning the post after having spent a week in a hospital due to stress. He had been hearing “extraterrestrial voices”—shades of Aleister Crowley and Aiwaz, or of Barney and Betty Hill, whose celebrated abduction by a UFO had taken place the previous month in New Hampshire—and having seizures.

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At the end of October, Jones left Indianapolis for a few weeks of rest and recuperation, in Hawaii according to most accounts. Unfortunately, as Jim Hougan points out, this story is patently false, for the Guyanese newspapers have Jones in their country in late October 1961. He could not have been in both Hawaii and Guyana the same week of October. Not in 1961. Further, he is supposed to have stopped in Mexico City during that time as well, which renders the impossibility of being in three different countries spread that far apart in the same week.

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Further, there is evidence that Jones had been under psychiatric care in San Francisco and—as Hougan points out—some have offered the opinion that Jones went to Hawaii in order to “receive psychiatric care without publicity.”

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Nonetheless, what is known about Jones beyond any doubt is that he was under psychiatric care at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, a hospital that conducts experiments on behalf of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department, and where “virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre was eventually treated.”

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Witnesses describe Jones’ lifestyle in Brazil as lavish; others as meager at best. Witnesses say that Jones was setting up an orphanage in Brazil, but for whom and with what fund- ing is not described; others say that Jones did no missionary work at all in Brazil, but left the house each morning with a briefcase and returned each evening with few comments on where he had been or what he had done. He would make passing references to Naval Intelligence (à la Ron Hubbard) or to other government work; people who knew him in Brazil thought of him as a spy: no Brazilians who knew Jones during his stay there and can attest to his Christian missionary work have been discovered. Whatever took place in Brazil, by the time he returned to the United States he had undergone a conversion to socialism, a conversion that would eventually lead him to espouse Communism as the only way.

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According to Hougan’s sources, Jones was there to study the phenomenon of David Miranda, a Pentecostalist minister who started his own congrega- tion—the Church of God is Love—in Brazil in 1960-61, shortly before Jones’ arrival. Miranda’s mix of Christian fundamentalist Pentecostalism with faith healing and (as accused in 1999) money laundering would have attracted the like-minded Jones. Hougan believes, however, that there might have been another element to Jones’ fascination with Miranda, and that would have been the CIA’s interest in “mass conversion techniques” as part of its MK-ULTRA program. Certainly, Jones’ visit to Brazil coincides with a major effort on behalf of the CIA to study primitive religions worldwide, from the psilocybin-eating Indians of Mexico to the Yoruba faith healers of Nigeria. This was not only a CIA interest, for the military had also actively pursued these studies in the name of psychological warfare.

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Before Puharich’s posting, one Dr. Laurence J. Layton was posted to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, a test center for the Chemical Warfare Division of the US Army; this was in November of 1951. In March of 1952, Layton had been named Chief of the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Division, a position he held until 1954. In other words, Dr. Layton was—at least on paper—Dr. Puharich’s boss. The relevance of this will become clear shortly. Suffice it to say for now that Dr. Layton—and especially his children, Larry Jr. and Deborah—would play a major role in the events that led up to the Jonestown massacre and that Larry Jr. is still in prison, the only man ever convicted of murder in that hideous event, while it was his sister, Deborah, who had been an important influence on Congressman Leo Ryan’s decision to go to Jonestown in the first place.

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Deborah Layton—after a stint in the United Kingdom at a strict Quaker school—was finally drawn into the Peoples Temple experience by her brother Larry. This was when the Temple was located in Ukiah, California. Gradually she became very involved with the group and was entrusted to greater and greater responsibilities by Jim Jones. She found herself becoming part of an inner circle that handled the money, and was involved in moving funds out of the United States and into bank accounts in Latin America and Europe. Just as Rev. David Miranda of Brazil would be accused of doing some twenty years later, Jim Jones moved millions of dollars out of the country using church members as “mules,” carrying the cash with them and depositing it in various accounts spread over the globe.

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His socialist rants from the pulpit of the Peoples Temple church in Ukiah and, later, in San Francisco became increasingly full of dire warnings about the doom facing America and the coming race war that would target groups like the Peoples Temple and its followers. Like any good member of the Disciples of Christ, Jones’ view of the late twentieth century was apocalyptic. There would be a conflagration, perhaps a nuclear war, and only those he managed to save would survive the holocaust. Jones’ vision of an imminent race war was eerily similar to Manson’s. One could say they were on either side of the same argument: Jones (ostensibly) wanted to preserve the black people of America and Manson wanted them destroyed. Both, however, saw race war as inevitable. When the dust cleared, however, Manson had killed only white people (with an attempted murder on one black drug dealer); Jones had killed hundreds of black people in Jonestown.

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In October 1976, a month before the US presidential election that would put Jimmy Carter in the White House, a man named Bob Houston decided he would leave the Peoples Temple. He wrote a letter of resignation to Jim Jones on October 3rd. On October 5th, he was dead.

The pharmacy at Jonestown was heavily weighted in favor of narcotics and psychoactive compounds, and it is not clear to what extent these drugs were used in the everyday life of the commune. As for sex, Jones constantly complained of his continuous need for sex, and would enlist as many women as he could in his sexual stable. He would then ridicule the sexual lives of his male followers, and insist that all men but him were basically homosexual.

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He would control the sex lives of the members of the Peoples Temple, and arranged marriages between couples who were then not allowed to have sex. He would demand that wives complain publicly about the lack of sexual performance or prowess of their husbands, while demanding as well that they praise Jim Jones in that department. In other words, it was Mansonism writ large and, if possible, even uglier.

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California Congressman Leo J. Ryan was making a name for himself as a government watchdog. He had co-authored the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which required the CIA to get prior approval from Congress before undertaking any covert activity. In addition, he was asking questions about the CIA’s mind-control projects in the State of California, as he won- dered whether or not the notorious members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) had been the willing or unwilling beneficiaries of the MK-ULTRA program while serving time at Vacaville.

When Patty Hearst was finally freed she was put on trial for armed robbery as if she were legally culpable, a subject on which many psychiatrists disagreed passionately. It brought many of the old CIA mind-control experts out of the woodwork, although they were not necessarily advertised as such. Dr. William Sargant, who was a friend of Dr. Frank Olson and who advised the British intelligence agencies on inter- rogation and brainwashing techniques, was one of those who examined Patty Hearst, as was Dr. Martin Orne and Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the latter an expert on Chinese mind-control techniques.

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Donald DeFreeze, the commander of the SLA, had earlier been a prisoner at the Vacaville facility that was used by the CIA as part of their mind-control experimentation program. At Vacaville, an organization was set up to raise black consciousness—the Black Cultural Association, or BCA—which was under the direction of Professor Colston Westbrook. Westbrook has since been identified as a former intelligence officer who served in the Far East during the 1960s and, in fact, worked for AID

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The police were mobilized in an intensive manhunt to find the SLA and bring them to justice. No one who was in front of a television will ever forget the day in May when SWAT teams destroyed a house in such an intensive storm of gunfire that the building collapsed in flames. Six members of the SLA—including Donald DeFreeze, their leader known as “Cinque”—were killed in the conflagration. Patty Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris were not in the building at the time. The May 17, 1974 attack was criticized by some members of the press, especially when it became obvious that the inhabitants of the house—and of surrounding buildings, some of which were damaged in the fire—were given little opportunity to evacuate or surrender.

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The existence and actions of the SLA are so strange, and so illogical, and so out of context that the organization has been subject to the full-court press of the conspiracy theorists. The leader of the SLA—Donald DeFreeze, or “Cinque”—was black. Virtually everyone else in the SLA was white. (This is a mirror-image of the Peoples Temple, where the leader was white and the congregation black.) The group was believed to be Maoist, but the evidence for this was flimsy. Further, they claimed responsibility for the murder of Dr. Marcus Foster—Superintendent of the Oakland school system—in 1973 … by two white men who had used makeup during the commission of the crime, making themselves look black.

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DeFreeze himself was a police informant who spent very little time in prison, even though he had a record of arms-dealing, among other felonies. When he left prison, he simply walked out, leading many to assume that his escape was an inside job.

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Congressman Ryan may have been getting a little too close to the truth when he demanded that the CIA inform him of any relationship between Don- ald DeFreeze and MK-ULTRA. They responded in writing to his office on October of 1978, stating that there had been no connection that they could find (remember, most of the documents had been shredded long before). The wording is a perfect example of a typical CIA response and is worth quoting at length:

Dear Mr. Ryan: Thank you for your letter of 27 September to Admiral Turner requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville. It is true that CIA sponsored testing, using volunteer inmates, was conducted at that facility. The project was completed in 1968.… Your letter referred to Donald DeFreese [sic], known as CINQUE, and Clifford Jefferson, both of whom were inmates at Vacaville. In so far as our records reflect the names of the participants, there is nothing to indicate that either was in any way involved in the project.

The letter was date-stamped “18 Oct 1978,” and bore the signature stamp of Frank C. Carlucci. There are several points worth mentioning about this “non-denial denial” (as they used to say at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation). The first is the misspelling of Donald DeFreeze’s name, which—as any lawyer knows—is a way to cover one’s ass in the event that the denial is proved false. It means that there was no one at the facility being tested who bore the name “Donald DeFreese.” The CIA has used this tactic before. Yet, let us allow that it was an honest mistake, a typographical error by a typist. Then there is the question of “our records.” In the first place, the key MK-ULTRA records, of which the Vacaville experiments would have been a part, were all destroyed in 1973 (except for four boxes of accounting and bookkeeping records). So, the CIA had no records of it at all. In the second place, the letter is very careful to hedge even further: “In so far as our records reflect the names of the participants,” Very clever, considering that in all likelihood no records existed and, anyway, the name of DeFreeze was misspelled. Then there is the statement by future-CIA Director Carlucci that the project which had drawn Congressman Ryan’s scrutiny “was completed in 1968.” DeFreeze did not become an inmate at Vacaville until 1969. Thus, we are left with the distinct impression that the CIA had nothing to do with DeFreeze. But, from 1970 on, DeFreeze was in twice-weekly contact with Colston Westbrook, former intelligence officer under AID cover, psycho- logical warfare officer, and Vietnam veteran, who created and ran the Black Cultural Association at the facility. By running an operation at the prison at arm’s length, the CIA had what is known as “plausible deniability.” When DeFreeze was being sought by police during the SLA fiasco, he repeatedly warned that Westbrook was a CIA officer, but his warnings were taken as the ramblings of a deranged Communist and black revolutionary, and few paid his charges any attention.

A month to the day after he received his non-denial denial from the CIA, Congressman Ryan was dead on the ground at Port Kaituma, Guyana.

It was in that same year of 1976 that Jones began to expatriate the Temple funds to banks in Panama and Switzerland, using Deborah Layton as one of the administrators of these funds and as a courier. He had simply been amassing too much wealth—he had one hundred thousand dollars in cash in a safe at the Temple to cover “incidental expenses”– and he was getting thousands of dollars of cash donations every week, in addition to members’ Social Security checks and real estate that was signed over to the Temple.

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Yet another disturbing coincidence lies in the fact that the site chosen by Jones was in the Northwest District of Guyana, the same place where—in 1845—a Reverend Smith called together the local Native American population (including the Arawaks, Tituba’s countrymen), and told them the Millennium was at hand. When it did not materialize, Smith’s four hundred followers committed mass suicide on the spot, believing they would be resurrected as “white people.” The parallels to the Jonestown event are too strong to be ignored.

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The Temple members lived on rice and beans, and a little water (depending on the rainfall). It was, essentially, concentration-camp living, with the ever-present security forces alert to any deviation from the fixed routine, any complaint, no matter how reasonable or how minor. For infractions, one could be imprisoned in “the box” for extended periods of time, fed on a liquid diet—with vital signs monitored daily to ensure that the inmate was still alive—and subjected to interrogation by the security team until they were satisfied that the inmate was giving the correct answers. Children were subject to even worse treatment, taken to a well at the bottom of which two adults would be hiding in the water, waiting to grab the unfortunate child’s legs and drag him or her under the surface of the brackish water. After a long session of that, the child would be allowed to return to the surface, and then would have to walk all the way back to the compound through the jungle, repeating over and over, “I’m sorry, Father.”

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The pharmacy at Jonestown contained Thorazine, as well as “Quaaludes, Demerol, Seconal, Valium, Nembutal, morphine—enough to fill the ordinary needs of a city of sixty-five thousand people.” Another source records that large quantities of Haldol and Mellaril in liquid form were being shipped to Jonestown.

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One of the members accompanying Ryan to Jonestown was Richard Dwyer. Dwyer’s involvement in this—and subsequent discoveries about his back- ground in intelligence—is one of the more suggestive elements of the whole saga. Dwyer was a career intelligence officer, working under State Department cover at the US Embassy in Georgetown. He was, according to several sources, the CIA Chief of Station for Guyana. As such, he could be expected to have very good information on Jonestown; unfortunately, he did not choose to share this information with Ryan or his party. It was well-known in Georgetown that the Peoples Temple had strong influence with the Guyanese govern- ment; Temple women were expected to develop personal relationships with Guyanese officials, and one such woman was the mistress of the Guyanese ambassador to the United States. Dwyer would have had to have known all of this, as Georgetown is small as capitols go, a place where gossip is about the only entertainment there is. Further, as CIA station chief, it would have been his business to know all about the Peoples Temple political involvements, not only with the Guyanese government but also with the Soviet Union and Cuba, as the Temple had approached both of these countries—through their embassies in Georgetown—as possible relocation sites. Yet, Dwyer—and the State Department in general—remained strangely silent on the subject of the Peoples Temple and offered very little assistance to Congressman Ryan before and during his trip.

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Jones was quite aware of the effect that the isolation and insularity of the scene would have on the psyches of his flock. He demonstrated this during a session in which a young boy was accused of stealing. Jones lightly drugged the boy, telling him he could strike him dead. By the time the drug began to take effect, the boy was quaking in fear. He was revived briefly, in the darkened church and to the sound of the other members of the congre- gation making terrifying sounds, as if the boy had descended to the very pit of hell. The boy was then “brought back from the dead” by Jones, and the traumatized child promised he would never commit another crime in his life.

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Jones several times insists that Dwyer be allowed to leave; in fact, he doesn’t want Dwyer in Jonestown at all when the curtain comes down and calls over the loudspeaker to have him taken away. As we have seen, Dwyer was likely the local CIA Chief of Station. Why, suddenly, is Jones worried for his safety? If the whole congregation is going to commit mass suicide (as the cover story would have it), then why would Jones care one way or another about Dwyer?

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Many of the victims bore gunshot wounds, which argues strongly against the suicide-by-Kool-Aid story that was disseminated shortly after the massacre. Those who did survive recall the sounds of gunshots in such abundance it sounded like a war. The security forces had armed themselves with heavy automatic weapons at the start of Jones’ plea for suicide and were ensuring that none would escape the compound.

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Aerial photographs of the site days later would show the famous scene of bodies all over the compound; millions saw those photographs in the news magazines, but few came to the obvious conclusion: the bodies were all lying facedown and in many cases neatly arranged, indicating that the story of mass suicide might have been in error. It beggars belief that everyone in Jonestown would have fallen forward onto their faces after taking the cyanide-laced grape drink. It is entirely possible that the bodies were arranged that way to make their identification more difficult when photographed from above. It is also entirely possible that the bodies were arranged that way by persons unknown after the massacre. For it was a massacre. Initially, the body count—performed by the first contingent of Guyanese troops that arrived the morning after the massacre—was only about two hun- dred. Later, as the days went on and more investigators (and curiosity-seekers) arrived, the body count was corrected upwards. At first, it was believed that the grand total would come in at three hundred sixty-three, of which eighty-two were identified as children. Yet, as the body count increased, the incredulous wanted to know how it was possible that it could go from 363 to 913; how was such a wide variation possible?

Photos of some of the bodies show that they were wearing identification bracelets on their wrists, the type commonly used in hospitals to identify patients. No one knows why this was done, and particularly why those bracelets mysteriously disappeared somewhere between Jonestown and the American air base where the bodies were eventually shipped, thus rendering further identification even more difficult.

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The bodies were left in the open jungle air for days, and had reached a particularly loathsome state of putrescence, rendering hellish the task of coroners and medical examiners. In fact, there were virtually no autopsies performed on the bodies recovered.

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Only seven autopsies were ever performed on the more than nine hundred bodies found at Jonestown, and only one of those showed any sign of cyanide poisoning.

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Dr. Mootoo, Guyana’s chief medical examiner, noted that many of the victims had puncture wounds from syringes on their shoulders, where they could not have possibly injected themselves. In addition, cyanide was present in bottles labeled Valium, and Mootoo assumed that the victims had been given the fictitious Valium and discovered the switch too late, as they lay dying. To summarize his findings, he believed that the evidence strongly supported a charge of homicide in at least seven hundred cases. The tissue samples that he collected at the site—representing tests of more than twenty bodies—were handed over to an official of the American embassy for onward transmission to forensic specialists in the United States. They never arrived, and to this day no one knows what happened to them.

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As if anyone needed additional mysteries to solve, Jim Hougan points out one more incredible anomaly: the CIA knew that there were mass suicides in Jonestown at 4:44 A.m. on Sunday morning, Guyana time. But the site had not been visited until mid-morning that same day by Guyanese troops. How did the CIA know that there had been mass suicides in Jonestown at least six hours before anyone else did? One of the planes involved in the attack at Port Kaituma had managed to leave and make its way to Georgetown the night of the 18th, but the only news they had was of the attack on the Congressman’s party at the airstrip and the murder of five people whose bodies still lay on the tarmac. No one knew about the massive death toll at Jonestown until the next day. Yet, somehow, the CIA knew all about it and was already spinning the story as a “mass suicide.” Hougan believes the probable source to be Richard Dwyer; in addition, a CIA memorandum concerning Guyana refers to a CIA “field station” in Guyana, giving rise to speculation that there was another CIA operation in Guyana beyond that of Dwyer’s embassy posting.

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The deaths did not end with the massacre at Jonestown. As in the case of the Manson Family murders, people connected with the case continued to die from gunshot wounds for quite some time after the discovery of all those bodies in the jungle.

Only nine days after the Jonestown massacre, San Francisco Mayor Moscone—whom Jones had helped to elect in the 1976 campaign—was shot dead, as was Harvey Milk, the famous defender of gay rights in government. There are numerous photos of Moscone and Jones, and even at the height of the Peoples Temple scandals in the press, Moscone stood behind Jones and was vocal in his support of the church. There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest Peoples Temple involvement in these deaths, but nothing substantial enough to warrant a full discussion at this point.

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On October 21, 1985, White was found dead in his garage, a victim of probable suicide from carbon monoxide poisoning. The motives for the Moscone and Milk murders were never very clear. White had no particular agenda against Moscone. He had resigned his city position for the simple reason that it would not pay enough to support him and his family. He then decided to retract his resignation, but there was no legal precedent for it. All in all, it did not seem enough to warrant his insane plan to murder the Mayor. As a political and moral conservative, he prob- ably despised gay activist Harvey Milk; it’s possible that he considered killing Milk at the same time as Moscone on general principle. But we will never know; White had confessed to the crimes, and it only wanted a decision by the courts as to whether the homicides were murder or manslaughter. The question of motive was not explored because, quite simply, White insisted he didn’t even remember committing the crimes.

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On July 31, 1980 the surviving children of Congressman Leo Ryan’s family brought a lawsuit against the United States of America in the matter of Ryan’s assassination. They charged that the State Department knew in advance of the dangers inherent in a trip to Jonestown, but failed to warn the Congressman in advance. They further charged that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment, and that the community was heavily armed, and was infiltrated by CIA agents

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There are also persistent rumors that some of the security staff escaped into the jungles with a suitcase full of cash. The Temple owned three sailing vessels in Guyana, which were all at sea at the time of the massacre.

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Who were on these vessels? How many were they? Where were they dropped off? No one seems to care.

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As for Jim Jones himself, his fate is also open to question. His death was ruled a suicide, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The pistol he is alleged to have used, however, was found far away from his body. At least one researcher—Michael Meier—insists that the body that was identified as Jim Jones at the scene could not have been Jones, because the body does not match some essential physical characteristics, thus giving rise to the “Jim Jones double” theory; that Jones may have had a double is supported by some circumstantial evidence, as shown in the Jim Hougan article. In Meier’s view, the real Jim Jones is sipping banana daiquiris on a tropical beach somewhere, enjoying his millions in relative peace. Hard to believe? Sure. But, as so often in this study, we are confronted with more questions than answers. One wonders, for instance, where Dwyer was at the moment Jones was killed? Jones wanted him gone; thus he seemed to have been there at the time of the massacre. Was he Jim Jones’ executioner, playing the Marlow to his Kurtz? Or was it a bit more like the Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando characters in Apocalypse Now, with Brando’s crazed but successful renegade Colonel—surrounded by his Montagnard Army who revere him “as a god”—who must be assassinated by Sheen’s Captain Willard.

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I like to think that Jim Jones was Colonel Kurtz; that he had been recruited by the CIA in his early days, and then become increasingly psychotic as his personal and spiritual isolation grew. I like to think that the CIA used him and his Guyana operation for a variety of experiments in situ because it was outside the United States, in the middle of nowhere, far beyond any possibility of congressional interlopers (until events forced Congressman Ryan’s hand), and anyway the victims were poor, black, and socialist; by openly accepting Jones’ rabid form of “apostolic socialism” and parroting his fear of an attack by the fascists, the Nazis, the KKK, the CIA, the FBI, etc., they had placed themselves beyond the pale. They could not be repatriated.

What interests us about the October Surprise and the development of the plan into what eventually became known as Iran-Contra is the involvement of some of the strangest people ever to become associated with American politics—which, as the attentive reader may agree, is quite an accomplishment.

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In this case, we are talking about the woman who first blew the whistle on October Surprise with a book of the same title, a woman who worked for the Reagan Administration and who resigned her staff position, charging sexual harassment: Barbara Honegger. Incredibly, Barbara Honegger brings us back again full circle to the weird, post-war group that first attracted our attention in Book One: the Round Table of Andrija Puharich, the same Round Table whose members were inexplicably linked to the assassination of President Kennedy. For it was Puharich, Honegger, accused murderer Ira Einhorn, and nuclear physicists Saul Paul Sirag and Jack Sarfatti who formed a nucleus of another sort in the 1970s, and who brought The Nine back to life—and back in operation—in the person of Israeli psychic and sometime intelligence agent Uri Geller.

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As if this story needed to get any stranger, Honegger then—according to accounts published on the Internet—befriended the wife of one of the Iran- Contra pilots, Gunther Russbacher; and now we are well and truly in over our heads.

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A letter to Robert Hunt from Moshe Ben-Manash, Special Envoy to the Israeli Ambassador to Washington, dated November 11, 1993, confirms the presence of Robert McFarlane, Oliver North, Robert Hunt, George Cave, Howard Teicher, Gunther Russbacher and John R. Segal on a flight that left Israel loaded with one pallet of spare parts for the Hawk missile system. Russbacher and Segal (the latter identified as CIA) are mentioned as the pilots of the aircraft.

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Several years later, Gunther Russbacher married a woman who believes herself to be descended from royalty, a woman who also believes that she and her brother were experimented upon by the government when they were children, who believes that her eggs were taken from her when she was eleven years old, etc. Her stories—available on the Internet through various sites—are a bizarre trip through a very disturbed psyche. She recounts events whose participants are all high-ranking US government personalities—engaged in weird, uncharacteristic behavior involving Templar chapels, underground submarine bases, and the like—and an individual introduced to her as the “King of the World.”

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Yet, here we have the intrepid Rayelan Allan Russbacher feeding information to Barbara Honegger on Iran-Contra… the same Barbara Honegger who was Saul Paul Sirag’s main squeeze… who has a master’s degree in parapsychology… who was an intimate of the circle around Puharich and Sarfatti and Einhorn... …and who today is a military affairs journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School, Department of the Navy. A journalist who warned Washington a week after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center that a fifth column within the American military and justice systems—including a judge, military officers, pilots, and even Israeli intelligence—had advance warning of the attacks and did nothing to stop them, and may, indeed, have had a hand in planning and carrying out the horrendous events of that day. It… it… boggles the mind.

Sarfatti had been getting calls from someone speaking in a strange, metallic voice stating that it was the voice of a computer aboard a spacecraft hovering over the earth. These calls went on for a while, and would cause the young Sarfatti to wander around dazed.

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There is a lot of Sarfatti email correspondence available on the Internet, much of which is concerned with quantum mechanics and nuclear physics in general, but some of which has to do with the events surrounding Spectra and The Nine. There are times when Sarfatti is obviously doubtful about the communications, wondering if they were the product of some bizarre sort of intelligence agency mind-control program.

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The fact that Puharich would also arrange long-term psychic experiments involving children at his farm in upstate New York in the 1970s gives one pause, considering the long military and intelligence background of Puharich.

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One of the predictions made in the calls was that in twenty years he would become involved with a group of people whose mission was the acceleration of human evolution through contact with these otherworldly agencies. This is exactly what happened, for in 1973 he began to develop contacts with other, like-minded, scientists through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and eventually with Puharich himself. These contacts would eventually culminate in a business venture in the 1980s with Harold Chipman, a CIA Chief of Station in San Francisco, who was involved with SRI and the paranormal testing that went on there with Puharich and Geller, as well as with Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, Ingo Swann, and the whole murder of crows that formed the most strictly controlled investigation of psychic phenomena that the United States had ever known.

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Sarfatti claims to have introduced Geller to Jacques Vallee—the French UFO researcher of Passport to Magonia fame—and both to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg would later produce Close Encounters of the Third Kind, using Vallee as a technical adviser: Vallee the Anton LaVey to Spielberg’s Ro- man Polanski. The character played by Francois Truffaut in the film is said to be based on Jacques Vallee himself. This same nexus of Puharich and Sarfatti is said to have influenced Gene Roddenberry in his development of the Star Trek television series.

Mark David Chapman is something of an enigma. The back story to his assassination of Lennon does not really compute: the trip around the world, the work for the YMCA that is missing from their files, the visit to war-torn Beirut, the trips back and forth between New York City and Honolulu, the story about the “Little People” in his head, his abrupt decision to plead guilty and avoid a trial … all of these things put together make him look uncomfortably like your standard political assassin or serial killer.

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It’s Chapman’s interior life that interests us most, however. He described his private childhood fantasies to Jack Jones, who recorded them in his biography of Chapman, Let Me Take You Down. Instead of an imaginary playmate, Chapman had an entire kingdom full of imaginary playmates. He called them the Little People, and he was their king. If they dissatisfied him in any way, he would blow them up “and a lot of them would die,” but they would forgive him later and everything would be okay. It’s possible he got this concept the “Little People” from his fascination with the film The Wizard of Oz.

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There is no guidance available as to why this deeply committed Christian would have picked Beirut when Jerusalem was also available. No one seems to be able to give an answer to this perplexing question. Beirut was already in the throes of political upheaval and instability, and was only weeks away from full-blown civil war. Mark was one of only two people sent to Beirut by ICCP/Abroad, and he spent very little time there once the shooting started. He made a tape-recording of the small-arms fire going on outside his hotel room window, which he brought back with him and played for friends. He was obviously very shaken and paradoxically excited by this experience. From Fenton Bresler’s point of view, he was sent to Beirut to be “blooded.”

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At that time, Mark had developed another, very odd, relationship with a man whose name is only given as the pseudonym “Gene Scott” in Bresler’s book, but was later identified as “Dana Reeves” in the Jack Jones biography of Chapman. This gentleman was an officer with a Georgia sheriff ’s department at the time Bresler’s book was being written (1989), and it is not known where he is today, but his influence over Mark was powerful and bizarre. Chapman, who was said to despise guns and violence, became a gun enthusiast around this man and seemed to be under the control of his personality in some way. And as it turns out, it was this same mysterious individual who supplied Mark David Chapman with the hollow-point bullets he used to murder John Lennon.

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Some commentators have written that Chapman’s trip to Hawaii was for the purpose of committing suicide. Others have said that Chapman went to Hawaii for further training and indoctrination by any one of several classified military operations that were based on the islands. What we do know is that Chapman did, indeed, attempt suicide in Hawaii by means of a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the closed window of his car, but it was a pathetic and failed attempt and Chapman wound up in a mental hospital. This juxtaposition of Hawaii and mental hospital is one that we encountered already in the case of Jim Jones. In Jones’ case, the belief is that he committed himself to a hospital or clinic in Hawaii in order to avoid adverse publicity back on the mainland. Chapman would have had no such qualms. Yet, the nexus of Hawaii and hospitals comes up again in the Son of Sam case, where it was revealed that drugs were making their way onto the mainland from Hawaii by being secreted in bags of plasma. The plasma would arrive in a hospital in New York City and the drugs removed there by hospital workers who were one link in the supply chain. This trafficking in narcotics is said to be one of the main sources of income for the Son of Sam cult. Chapman was in Hawaii at the time of the Son of Sam killings, and it is worthwhile to note that he did have access to unexplained sources of income during that time, income that helped finance his trip around the world and his subsequent flights to New York City leading up to the assassination of Lennon in 1980. In fact, one of the strangest episodes of Chapman’s visits to New York was his taking a cab through the city and stopping for a few minutes at various apartment buildings where he seemed to be making pickups or deliveries, which makes no sense since Chapman supposedly knew no one in New York. At one point, he offered the cab driver some cocaine, which is also totally out of character for Chapman at that time (this was long after his “drugged out hippie” days in Columbia High School in Georgia) and has never been explained; but if Chapman was making drug deliveries in Manhattan it all begins to make much more sense: everything from the Hawaiian hospital connection to the multiple air fares to New York to the unexplained source of income to the strange cab ride and the offering of cocaine. As I used to tell people in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, if you overheard a conversation between two people and it didn’t make any sense, it was probably about drugs.

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Bresler has noted that all the documentation possessed by Chapman at the time of his arrest checks out. His Hawaiian driver’s license was issued in July of 1977, which is about right. The owner of the apartment where he stayed says that he did, indeed, live at the address on Puwa Place in Kailua where he said he was. Everything seems fine. Except that the owner says that Chapman was living with “a woman and three young children,” and that they left owing a month’s rent, had no electricity in their final month at the complex, and left the apartment in such a mess that it cost two thousand dollars to clean it up. A search of records at the post office and other agencies in Kailua failed to turn up any identification of the mysterious woman and her three children. The records of the apartment complex do not show Chapman as having lived there, even though it is the precise address on his driver’s license.

In mid-August 1981, Chapman suddenly went berserk. He began screaming at other prisoners, tearing up his Bible and attempting to flush it down the toilet in his cell, which caused it to overflow. He splashed the water from the toilet at the guards, tore off his clothes, and started screaming like a monkey. (Shades of the Sirhan Sirhan hypnosis session with Dr. Diamond!) It took six men to subdue him, and bundle him off to Bellevue, New York’s famous mental hospital. In the ambulance on the way, he spoke to his guards in two entirely different demonic voices, named Lila and Dobar. They said they had been sent to him by Satan. After he was injected with anti-psychotics, the demonic presences began to fade, but not disappear entirely. He was visited by clergymen and prison chaplains of various denominations; all were convinced that Chapman was possessed by demons, a claim that only made Chapman angry. On August 24, 1981 he was sentenced to twenty-to-life at Attica. In Attica, in 1982, he began to invoke Satan again. His wife visited him and tried to exorcise the demons herself, but to no avail. Eventually, Chapman’s demons faded once again, and he became somewhat normal.

Taxi Driver was based, in part, on the George Wallace assassination attempt committed by Arthur Bremer, and on Bremer’s diary. Thus, it was a case of art imitating life. Bremer had used a Charter Arms .38 revolver, the same make and model as that later used by Mark David Chapman. Bremer had attempted his assassination of Wallace on May 15, 1972. His Charter Arms revolver only held five bullets, like that used by Chapman eight years later. Yet, Wallace was struck by a minimum of four bullets, and possibly all five. Taking into consideration the fact that three other people were wounded in the same fusillade, it would appear that at least eight bullets had been fired, which immediately raises the ugly specter of a second shooter, and thus of a conspiracy. Wallace himself always claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy that day. In addition, Bremer’s fingerprints were not found on the gun retrieved at the scene, even though the famous film footage of him shooting Wallace shows he was bare-handed and not wearing gloves. An FBI agent retrieved it, not from Bremer, but from the ground where the assassination attempt had taken place, and held on to it for hours. No one knows why. Like Chapman, Bremer traveled extensively in the days leading up to the murder; this for a man whose jobs were as a busboy in a restaurant and as a janitor. In fact, Bremer had also flown to New York City (from Milwaukee) and stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the same hotel favored by Chapman on his original trip to New York. In the days leading up to the Wallace attempt, Bremer had bought a second- hand car, took a helicopter ride around New York City, rented limousines, bought weapons, etc., all on a busboy’s salary. Records of his hotel stays, bills, etc. were seized by the FBI and not made available to the press. Bremer’s half-sister—Gail Aiken—was a close associate of Reverend Jerry Owen, the man who befriended Sirhan Sirhan in the days leading up to the Robert Kennedy assassination: yet another minister of religion with mysterious ties to assassination and murder. Reverend Owen was believed to be one of the sources of income for Sirhan Sirhan, and one of the members of the assassination conspiracy, according to researchers Turner and Christian.

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On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley, Jr.—strongly influenced by Taxi Driver (based in part on Bremer) and by Chapman’s murder of John Lennon—attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, armed with a revolver and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. A case of life imitating art imitating life.

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The Hinckley family knew the Bush family; both were in the oil business. Hinckley’s father had an appointment the day of the Reagan assassination attempt with George Bush’s brother in West Virginia.

He does consider coincidence may possibly have some form of significance, based on Jung and Pauli's conversations in regards to synchronicity. That may explain why he seems to linger on such things, though his main focus is nevertheless the "scarlet thread" of murder running through American religion and politics, which is a pretty broad subject on its own.